All Out War: The Full Story of How Brexit Sank Britain’s Political Class. Tim Shipman
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with wires hanging out’, Oxley remembered. One day Steve Baker walked in and wrote on a bare wall, ‘You’re all heroes.’ There never was a big event. Banks thought the video was terrible. In an email to Elliott two days later he wrote: ‘The website is awful, the Facebook page worse … You may know politics but have ABSOLUTELY no clue how to reach out to a wider audience … If this is your best shot you should be shot.’12 Cummings’ vindication came a week later when the In campaign launched. Their live event was derailed by gaffes, and slammed by the media as a shambles.
At Ukip headquarters, Farage and Bruni-Lowe were delighted their endorsement of Banks had borne fruit so quickly. ‘Within a fortnight, Vote Leave was launched,’ Farage said. ‘So we were forcing the agenda. We were actually quite proud of ourselves, to be honest with you.’ Rob Oxley admitted that there was something in this: ‘One thing which they did was they effectively forced our hand.’
Having given Elliott and Cummings a shove, Farage and co. now decided they would pressure them to run the kind of campaign they believed would win. They had three demands: that Farage be prominent in the campaign, that immigration be its key message, and that Vote Leave set up a proper ground campaign to harness the Ukip people’s army.
Bruni-Lowe was sceptical about Elliott’s campaign model. The Taxpayers’ Alliance and Big Brother Watch were media-driven organisations: ‘They say to donors, “Look, we’ve got five hundred quotes in the media this week, give us money.” It’s not a real grassroots campaign. Our view was, if we can create competition, it will basically make Elliott do what he’s never done before, which is set up a ground campaign.’
In October, Elliott and Cummings said they would engage with Ukip and Farage. Bruni-Lowe claims this led to an agreement that Ukip would be less aggressive. ‘We said, “OK, we’ll back off. And we’ll let you do it.”’
But the prospect of cooperation was soon dashed, when a damaging rift opened up over immigration. At the start of December Bruni-Lowe commissioned a poll of 10,000 people who were undecided how they would vote. It found that controlling the UK’s border and setting ‘our own immigration policy’ was the number-one reason people gave that might persuade them to back Leave. Just under 38 per cent put it top, more than twenty points clear of saving money, which was second. By a margin of 59 per cent to 18 per cent these swing voters said Cameron and other leaders were wrong to sign an agreement allowing Turkish citizens visa-free travel in Europe.
Bruni-Lowe and Farage went to see Cummings to show him the polling. ‘Immigration is the number-one issue for undecideds, even for the people who want to vote Remain,’ Bruni-Lowe explained. ‘Controlling the borders is the one issue that would make them vote Leave. We can produce literature in January on Turkey and immigration.’
Cummings declined the advice, saying that a focus on immigration would turn off undecided voters. He and others insist he always intended to use the issue nearer polling day. But he did not confide in the Kippers that day. They left in despair. ‘Our view was that most undecided voters don’t vote, and what we were going to need to do was motivate our base in the northern heartlands in order to get the turnout much higher,’ said Bruni-Lowe. ‘It was the number-one issue, and they just wouldn’t acknowledge it. It was a class-based thing. They thought it was unpalatable at dinner parties. They wouldn’t touch it. That was always the problem with Vote Leave.’ Farage vowed to go it alone again. As they left, he said, ‘Fuck that, we’ve got to just go for it.’
Vote Leave and Leave.EU were now effectively at war. It meant Cummings and Elliott were fighting on two fronts, because while the Eurosceptics were battling among themselves, their real enemy – the Remain campaign – had launched with a loud fanfare.
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Andrew Cooper listened to the answers, made careful notes, and tried to remain positive. It was difficult. A thickset, balding man with hunched shoulders, it was said even by friends that he often appeared ‘the most lugubrious man in the room’. In more than two decades as a pollster, and as one of the chief architects of David Cameron’s modernisation of the Conservative Party, Cooper had overseen some pretty difficult focus groups – but these were not giving great grounds for hope to the embryonic EU ‘In’ campaign Cooper had been hired to help.
It was April 2015, just before the general election, and Cooper had seen the same warning signs in his polls. Sitting down with Peter Mandelson, the leading public relations executive Roland Rudd, Rudd’s chief sidekick Lucy Thomas, and Susan Hitch, who worked with David Sainsbury, the millionaire former Labour donor, he took them through the evidence. His message was simple: Britain was much more Eurosceptic than they had feared.
‘What we found was this very hard set view about why our hearts say we don’t like the EU and why we should leave it,’ Cooper said. ‘One, it costs a bloody fortune. Two, immigration: migrants coming here and taking our jobs and our benefits, putting pressure on our services. Three, it meddles in our lives in ways which we didn’t have before. The first two were much more important than the third.’ But here was the kicker, the real punch in the guts for a pro-European like Cooper: ‘Then you say, “OK, that’s what you don’t like. What are the positives?” And you’d usually get silence.’ The focus-group members would look at each other sheepishly, and someone would say, ‘Well, there’s the trade …’ But Cooper could tell their hearts were not in it.
After a month of work he outlined the headline voting figures. The raw statistics showed ‘Yes’ to Europe beating ‘No’ by 53 per cent to 47 per cent. But when he factored in differential turnout – the effect of passionate Eurosceptics being more likely to vote – the result was a virtual dead heat: 50.2 per cent for ‘Yes’, 49.8 per cent for ‘No’.
Lucy Thomas was usually a cheerful soul. A former BBC reporter in Brussels, she was campaign director of Roland Rudd’s pro-EU outfit Business for New Europe when the small team began putting together a prototype ‘In’ campaign. But even she struggled on the day she watched Cooper’s presentation. She thought to herself, ‘Oh God, this is going to be a lot harder than we thought. There was no sense of what the positives were.’
‘They all thought it was a more challenging picture than they had hoped for,’ Cooper said. ‘Underlying attitudes were very sceptical.’
Cooper had been approached in February by Susan Hitch, who remembered his role on Better Together, the cross-party campaign that had helped to win the Scottish independence referendum the year before. In March 2015 Thomas hired Cooper’s company, Populus. His first task was a ‘segmentation analysis’, dividing up the country into different groups of voters based on their attitudes to Europe. ‘You’re really trying to dig into people’s deeper feelings,’ he says. ‘So rather than just asking about a referendum directly, you’re trying to get a sense of their worldview and their feelings about multiculturalism, globalisation, engagement with other countries, their sense of optimism/pessimism. What the segmentation poll does is trying to get beyond the headline poll position to a deeper understanding of the country’s attitude.’
By 15 April Cooper had found six attitudinally similar groups, given them names and constructed a profile of each one, complete with a picture of a typical member. He found that two groups – ‘Ardent Internationalists’ and ‘Comfortable Europhiles’ – accounting for 29 per cent of the population, were almost certain to vote to stay. A third, much smaller group, ‘Engaged Metropolitans’, was also overwhelmingly for Remain, and was very active on social media.
Cooper identified two resolutely ‘Out’ groups. ‘Strong Sceptics’ were almost entirely white, likely to be aged over fifty-five, from the C2DE social bracket and with only a secondary education. They were often Labour voters flirting with Ukip, and made up 21 per cent of the population. The ‘EU Hostiles’ were typically retired, living mortgage-free on a private pension, and supporters of Ukip who got their news from the Daily